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Introduction: Eastern European-Middle Eastern Relations: Continuities and Changes from the Time of Empires to the Cold War

Part of: Eastern European–Middle Eastern Relations: Continuities and Changes from the Time of Empires to the Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2021

Sandrine Kott  and
Cyrus Schayegh
Sandrine Kott*
Affiliation:
Département d'histoire générale, Université de Genève, Faculté des Lettres, 5, Rue Saint-Ours (rez) CH-1205, Geneva, Switzerland
Cyrus Schayegh*
Affiliation:
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2/511, Maison de la Paix, Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2, CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland
*
sandrine.kott@unige.ch
cyrus.schayegh@graduateinstitute.ch
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Contemporary European History , Volume 30 , Special Issue 4: European-Middle Eastern Relations: Continuities and Changes from the Time of Empires to the Cold War , November 2021 , pp. 463 - 477
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

The aim of this special issue is to study the Middle East and Eastern Europe (including south-eastern Europe) as one interwoven space and to use it as a laboratory to explore conceptual issues regarding modern (societal) transnational and (state) international history. In this introduction we wish to analyse and explain the changing relations between the various states of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, with an eye also to Russia/the Soviet Union. We will highlight two patterns: similar ethno-religious-linguistically heterogeneous populations and shared peripherality vis-à-vis Western Europe. The question of interplays and overlaps between nation-states and empires and the geographic proximity of Eastern Europe and the Middle East cut across these two patterns, constituting a broader framework. Throughout, the reader will note three generic interlocking traits. Eastern Europe and the Middle East are not internally homogeneous and fixed, nor is their relationship, which indeed is irreducibly diverse in the political as well as in the economic, social and cultural fields. This diversity is reflected in the variety of contexts and actors who appear in the articles, including statesmen, merchants, activists, journalists, thinkers, architects, and bureaucrats.

We have had the privilege to build on a firm scholarly bedrock as we conceptualised this special issue, and specifically on three broad debates whose geographies interlock. First, historians of both Eastern Europe and the Middle East have been advocating for these regions to be embedded in larger trans-regional, inter-imperial and global narratives.Footnote 1 This approach overlaps with recent studies of socialist globalisations and Second/Third World interactions. Second, historians are increasingly reevaluating the connections between Western and Eastern Europe before and during the Cold War.Footnote 2 The third debate is grounded in Ottoman geography. In the 1500s–1600s, Istanbul's writ stretched to the southern borders of present-day Slovenia, Austria and Slovakia, covering today's southern-most Ukraine (partly through its Crimean Khanate vassal state), enveloping a good part of the Caucasus, and encircling the Black Sea; even in the 1800s and into the early 1900s Istanbul kept considerable European possessions. Crucially, then, the Ottoman Empire was the only polity that straddled Eastern Europe and the Middle East. As a result, Ottomanists and post-Ottomanists are now exploring common post-imperial legacies in both (southern) Eastern Europe and the Middle East.Footnote 3 More generally, historians see the Ottoman Empire as part of Europe, in parallel to and/or despite its Muslim rulers and non-European possessions. Daniel Goffman has invoked a Greater European World until the 1600s, and argued that Istanbul was its centre, not Western Europe.Footnote 4 To quote Mark Mazower, the ‘historiographical challenge [is] how to fit the centuries of Ottoman rule into the story of the [European] continent as a whole.’Footnote 5

In what follows, we will first highlight and explore the above mentioned two patterns: ethno-religious-linguistically heterogeneous populations and shared peripherality vis-à-vis Western Europe. We will then discuss the extent to which this shared history reverberated in the relationships between Eastern Europe and the Middle East after the Second World War. This long-term perspective allows us to interpret postwar relationships as more than merely a function of Cold War strategies.

Common Heterogeneity

Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, Eastern Europe and the Middle East were home to religiously, linguistically and ethnically heterogeneous populations, many of whom also maintained connections across the whole region. These included various Orthodox communities, Muslims and Jews,Footnote 6 as well as Catholics and Protestants (the last of whom arrived in the Middle East, in the form of US missionaries, only in the 1800s).Footnote 7 While brutal Catholic-Protestant civil and inter-state wars and Protestant-on-Protestant violence set in motion a trend toward religious homogenisation within particular states in the west of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Eastern Europe and the Middle East remained religiously as well as ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous in the early modern era.Footnote 8

This had various consequences. Firstly and most broadly, post-medieval Eastern Europe formed the part of the continent that was in most immediate and sustained contact with the Muslim-ruled Ottoman Empire and that featured the largest Muslim communities, including in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, western Russia, and the Habsburg Empire. Early modern historians have explored various diplomatic, cultural and economic interactions between Ottoman Muslims and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,Footnote 9 Russian Empire,Footnote 10 and Habsburg Empire.Footnote 11 In the long nineteenth century, multiple patterns emerge. Warsaw was a capital of the Turco-Tatar world even after Poland's third and fatal partition, in 1795, and into the interwar period.Footnote 12 Moreover, Polish nationalists hoped the Ottomans would support their liberation struggles, and a good number of Poles migrated to the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 13 Austria-Hungary maintained close if tense relations with the Ottoman Empire, and after its 1878 occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, formally annexed in 1908, possessed a sizable Muslim population in intimate contact with Istanbul.Footnote 14 Meanwhile, from the mid-1700s, Russia pushed back against the Ottomans, who sought to defend themselves. Beyond Eastern Europe, the Ottomans maintained relations with Russian Muslims, also to counter Russian pressure.Footnote 15 Istanbul was a key site for cultural-political exchanges between Ottoman and Russian Muslims.Footnote 16 And Russian Muslim refugees from beyond Russian-ruled Eastern Europe, most importantly the Caucasus, also moved to the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 17 In the southeastern parts of Europe, Russia promoted pan-Slavism to undercut the Ottomans and contain ‘small’ southeastern European nationalisms.Footnote 18

This issue leads us to a second consequence of the fact that the population in early modern Eastern Europe and the Middle East was not religiously homogeneous. The birth and consolidation of nation-states in this region, starting with Greece in 1830, was more brutal than in modern Europe to its west. This was because religion was used politically to create a sense of community while excluding others. Greater religious heterogeneity had persisted in Eastern compared to Western Europe due to religious toleration in the early modern period, only to become deeply problematic in the age of nationalism. Religion became a tool to delimit and harden national boundaries and to create national identities. Heterogeneity per se does not, and alone could not, cause violence; but violence was triggered and powered by using these differences. Essential, too, were regional security fears, which helped to construct ‘minorities’Footnote 19 as a presumably dangerous fifth column colluding with rival states. Just as essential was international politics: the perceived and real weakness, from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, vis-à-vis domineering Western Europe and its greater homogeneity, a peripherality that we address further below.

National homogenisation was a central theme of this common history. From the 1820s to the 1920s about five million Muslims died of war-related causes and a similar number escaped from southeastern Europe (and the Caucasus and Crimea).Footnote 20 During this period, post-imperial national polities made sustained endeavours to enforce religious, ethnic and/or linguistic homogenisation. In the First World War, the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against Assyrians, Greek Orthodox and, most determinedly, Armenians, killing 300,000, 300,000 to 750,000, and about one million, respectively. 1923 saw a compulsory Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1.2 million Greek Orthodox and 400,000 Muslims; it was supported by the League of Nations and predated by various prewar failed or ‘successful’ exchanges. National Socialist Germany committed genocide of about 220,000 to 500,000 Romani; pursued genocidal policies toward Russian and Eastern European Slavs; and its Holocaust, although killing six million Jews throughout all of Nazi-occupied Europe, was centred on Eastern Europe. Toward the end of and following the Second World War, about ten million ethnic Germans were expelled or fled from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In 1948/9, over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled by Israeli forces or fled (nakba). Arab Ba‘athist Iraq waged war on its Kurdish north intermittently from the 1960s to 1991. Turkey has waged wars and campaigns of repression against Kurds in 1925, 1927–30, 1937–8, and (with a hiatus in 2013–15) since 1978. And the 1975–91 Lebanese civil war and especially the Syrian civil war of the 2010s involved ethnic cleansing.

Evidently, there were enormous differences and variations in kind and in space. Thus, the nakba was not the Holocaust; 1820s Greece was not 2010s Syria. Moreover, not all populations experienced violence simultaneously; the modern Ottoman and early-post-Ottoman mashriq – today's Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine – for instance enjoyed an ecumenical Age of Coexistence.Footnote 21 But all those instances emerged out of a common religiously heterogeneous early modern past, unlike the rest of Europe to the west. And as crucially, these events often unfolded in chains, one triggering or inspiring another.Footnote 22

One chain concerned the ‘shatterzone of empires.’Footnote 23 In a constricted sense, it stretched from the First World War I to the early/mid 1920s, when the Ottoman Empire's final collapse became interwoven with the fall of the Hohenzollern, Romanov and Habsburg empires. That quadruple imperial breakdown spawned varied and often linked civil and inter-state wars. Violence loomed throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East and deep into Russia and culminated in episodes of ethnic cleansing, for instance during the Balkan wars of 1912–13. The Report of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars, set up by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, attributed this violence to the savagery of the underdeveloped Balkan people.Footnote 24 Articulating the same prejudice, Winston Churchill famously derided those wars as waged by ‘pigmies’ in the wake of a single ‘war of giants’. Exhausted by the First World War, Western powers could not ‘pacify’ the region, especially the Middle East. This situation is the starting point of Alp Yenen's story in this collection. He shows how post-Ottoman ex-Young Turk émigrés campaigned for cross-border Muslim internationalism, allied with Soviet Russia against Western empires, especially Britain. Ironically, however, at the end of his story, revolutionary internationalism was overwritten by bilateral inter-state ties between the Soviet Union, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan.

A third consequence of the shared early modern heterogeneity of Eastern Europe and the Middle East relates to inter-state interventionism and mimesis. Let us start with two preliminary points. One is that these states were empires from the early modern period to the First World War. Like most empires, they tended to be based on difference and heterogeneity.Footnote 25 Imperial rulers not only tolerated heterogeneity but often encouraged it as a means of ensuring their imperial legitimacy over vast territories. Before the 1800s, they even attracted foreigners or allowed locals to stay, unconverted, after occupation, often for economic reasons.Footnote 26 Thus, not only the heterogeneity of their population but also their own imperial nature distinguished Eastern European empires from the rest of Europe. Atlantic Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, England/Scotland, Denmark/Norway were variously configured monarchies that had empires overseas but did not behave imperially at home.Footnote 27 And the German and Italian principalities and city states and the Swiss Confederation cantons neither had nor were empires.

The other preliminary point concerns nationalisms in Eastern Europe and the Middle East before the First World War. Although a long historiographical tradition and political discourse in Eastern European successor states has claimed the opposite, the empires in the long nineteenth century were not really a Völkerkäfig, a prison of nations. The case where this term perhaps applies most closely is Poland after the Prussian-Habsburg-Russian partitions: many Poles wanted their very own state. (At the same time, fascinatingly, Polish nationalism was the only such movement in the region in the long nineteenth century that had in effect itself been an imperial polity – the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – in the early modern period.)Footnote 28 Moreover, across the region, there was considerable ‘national indifference’ among some strata, with little clarity and much negotiation about one's national identity.Footnote 29 In the Habsburg/Austro-Hungarian Empire, ‘national political groups’ competition for access to state offices and subsidies was integrative; such competition actually bound nationalist movements to the Habsburg state. In discursive terms, it was hard for even hardcore nationalist politicians to think about a future outside the multinational Habsburg state.'Footnote 30 Christian Eastern European nationalist elites had much and often heavy-handed convincing and educating to do, especially vis-à-vis lower classes.Footnote 31 And last but not least, Zionists in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as well as in Russia and the rest of Europe, imagined well into the interwar period a Jewish state as part of an imperial framework, be it British (the 1903 Uganda Scheme) or Ottoman/British (Palestine).

Modern national movements challenged empires in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in complex ways. This challenge was both foreign and domestic – how to reconfigure the imperial body politic and specific policies to satisfy the minimum demands of national movements? As a consequence, inter-imperial interventionism and mimesis increased. The former, including the issue of extraterritorial rights starting with the 1774 Kücük Kaynarja Treaty that made Russia the effective extraterritorial protector of the sultan's Greek Orthodox subjects, has fascinated historians for a long time.Footnote 32 Scholarship on the latter is of more recent vintage.Footnote 33 Adam Mestyan's article in this special issue, on the Ottoman reception of the Austro-Hungarian Doppelmonarchie, contributes to these debates. He argues that the last five decades of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule were also the formative period of eastern Mediterranean-European regionalism. The inter-imperial relations between the two middle powers establish an alternative history to both national narratives and to British-French colonialism, offering an important counterargument to the equally valuable point that modern land empires and overseas empires were not as different as historians have long thought.Footnote 34 Mestyan also argues that the post-1867 Habsburg dualist model (‘independence’ within empire) became an attractive model for imperial reform among Ottoman Muslim intellectuals until 1921.

A fourth and final consequence of Eastern Europe's and the Middle East's shared heterogeneity was that modern ethnic disentanglements and cleansing remained incomplete. Groups who became known as ‘minorities’ after the First World War maintained contacts with co-ethnic peers in other countries and sometimes with the ‘mother’ country, whose political elites tried to use them to substantiate their expansionist claims, as in the case of Germany. The same is true for ‘Hungarians’ dispersed in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania. Other minorities were less nationalised and played the role of mediators. For instance, political ideas circulated in the ‘triangle Istanbul-Crimea-Poland’ in part due to the latter's small but active Tatar minority.Footnote 35 This theme is picked up by Rona Yona in her article on circulation within the Zionist movement. She shows how Labor Zionist factions consolidated as the hegemonic political power in the Jewish community of Palestine (the Yishuv) during the interwar period, leaving a profound imprint on the entire Zionist movement and, ultimately, on the State of Israel. She revisits this central process by focusing on interregional interactions and the shift of the centre of Labor Zionism from Eastern Europe to Mandatory Palestine.Footnote 36 Yet another example would be southeastern European Muslims, who stayed in touch with the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, also through continued migration.Footnote 37 This in turn helped interwar Kemalism become a ‘common platform for the elaboration of various yet interdependent [post-Ottoman] political and cultural practices’.Footnote 38

A Double Periphery

The second pattern that we would like to highlight is Eastern Europe's and the Middle East's shared peripherality vis-à-vis Western Europe. This position was rooted in the 1700s, crystallised in the 1800s, and lasted at least until the Second World War, persisting in some fields into the postwar period.

One manifestation of this shared peripherality had to do with mental maps.Footnote 39 Undoubtedly, there were crucial differences between Western European perceptions of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The former was an Oriental Other, as Edward Said has argued, while the latter was, according to Larry Wolff, a lesser Europe, at least since the Enlightenment.Footnote 40 Then again, several scholars trying to understand the particular relationship that Western Europe developed with its eastern neighbours have also used Said's orientalism as an analytical framework or a point of departure.Footnote 41 Eastern Europe (and western Russia)Footnote 42 was mentally mapped both as an ‘internal periphery’ and an alien Halbasien while the Ottoman Empire and Iran were labelled as the Near East. Literally touching Europe, they were perceived as less of an Other and as less uncivilised than Asia further east and especially than sub-Saharan Africans and native Americans. Eastern Europe and the Middle East was a single though heterogeneous periphery. As part of this picture, Western Europeans framed Eastern Christians and, from the later 1800s, ‘Aryan’ Iranians as (however lesser) Selves, and until the interwar period used the term Near East to include southeastern European areas. A simple Occident-versus-Orient binary did not exist then. Indeed, Milica Bakić-Hayden posits ‘nesting Orientalisms’, and Maria Todorova's term ‘Balkanism’ refers to southeastern Europe as ‘part of Europe, although, admittedly, for the past several centuries its provincial part or periphery, […] semi-colonial, quasi-colonial, but clearly not purely colonial’.Footnote 43

On a related note, European Christians had seen the Ottoman Empire and earlier states in core Muslim lands as a religiously defined Other long before the 1800s. This was not quite the sharp dichotomy famously proposed by Henri Pirenne.Footnote 44 Rather, Europeans saw the Ottoman lands as a region with which they shared fundamental political dilemmas, cultural and economic relationships and theological disputes.Footnote 45 The Middle East did not suddenly appear as a known Other in the nineteenth century – this was very old news indeed – but rather became seen as peripheral to Western Europe, which only now had the economic and military upper hand. As for Eastern Europe, it was only really from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that Western Europe started to frame it as a unit and perceive it as inferior.

Another manifestation of peripherality involved uneven economic development. During the interwar years Eastern Europe was widely portrayed by Western international organisations and experts as ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’. Interestingly enough, the first technical assistance programmes developed by these same experts were designed for the eastern and southern European peripheries and then exported to what were seen as ‘second peripheries’ – Latin America and the Middle East.Footnote 46 During the Second World War these international economic experts envisioned bringing ‘backward’ Europe out of its state of underdevelopment as a precondition for lasting peace. In an article published in 1944, the Polish economist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, who would become a World Bank official between 1947 and 1953, pleaded for priority aid to Eastern Europe coupled with large development programmes. He saw this combination as a blueprint for the rest of the underdeveloped world, and primarily for the Middle East. He described the Middle East and southeastern Europe as two ‘depressed areas’ that, however, have ‘an income which, though still low, was considerably higher than’ the Far East or colonial Africa.Footnote 47 These two areas did share a common intermediary position, then, between the West and the rest of the world.

A third manifestation of peripherality concerned sovereignty. Until the Second World War the Ottoman Empire and all Eastern European and Middle Eastern post-imperial states were neither extra-European colonies nor unconditionally sovereign European states. Rather, they formed a space of contested sovereignty.Footnote 48 This reflected a fundamental ambiguity. Western Europeans scorned the Ottoman Empire and post-imperial states of Eastern Europe and the Middle East as only semi-civilised – but admitted they were semi-civilised, unlike most other non-Europeans and non-whites around the world. This ambiguity was reflected in, and reinforced by, international law. The 1856 Treaty of Paris, which capped the Franco-Anglo-Ottoman victory over Russia in the Crimean War, formally admitted the Ottoman Empire to the Concert of Europe and to international public law and recognised its independence and territorial integrity. But it conditioned all this on Istanbul upholding its 1856 islahat firmanı (Reform Edict) that declared all Ottomans legally equal. Similarly, before the First World War – in 1856 regarding autonomous Romania; most importantly in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin regarding autonomous Bulgaria and independent Montenegro, Serbia and Romania – the Concert of Europe's powers, including those of Western Europe, conditioned the recognition of post-Ottoman polities on minority protection treaties. Between 1919 and 1923 the remaining European great powers, Britain and France, and other Western European states, partly through the League of Nations, applied the same general condition to all the successor states of the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and, in the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, to Turkey. The League imposed the same conditions on post-Mandate Iraq in 1932; France did the same in its (never ratified) post-Mandate alliance treaty with Syria in 1936; and so did the (still-born) British Peel plan to divide Mandate Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state allied with Britain in 1938.

Evidently, the use of the Mandate system by the League and its core powers as a new international legal and administrative tool in post-Ottoman but not in post-imperial German, Russian or Austro-Hungarian lands underlines that Eastern European and Middle Eastern peripherality was as heterogeneous as mental mapping. Even so, Eastern Europe and the Middle East had much in common. One point was the minority treaties imposed after the Mandates’ real or planned end. Another point was their birth. Early on, at the Paris Peace conference, some – for instance Jan Smuts, the South African Prime Minister co-negotiating at the postwar Paris Conference as part of the imperial British delegation – considered Mandates for all of the countries in the region, and only them (not also Africa and the Pacific). A last point was ex-Ottomans’ own views about the region. In July 1919 Arab nationalists demanded ‘complete political independence. . . . [As] the Arabs inhabiting the Syrian area [Greater Syria: present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan] are not naturally less gifted than other more advanced races and … by no means less developed than the Bulgarians, Serbians, Greeks, and Roumanians at the beginning of their independence, we protest against’ the Mandate system.Footnote 49

This contestation of the Mandate exemplified a broader, older pattern of contesting sovereignty limitations across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottoman authorities tried to minimise the writ of the 1856 Paris Treaty article conditioning its sovereignty.Footnote 50 Polities affected by the 1878 Berlin Treaty wrote constitutions, ignoring its injunctions;Footnote 51 they also expunged official signs of minorities’ presence, kept out Muslim and Jewish refugees hopeful to return, and encouraged or forced more to leave. And after the First World War, polities did their best to ignore or sidestep the post-war treaties, using various legal and administrative means.Footnote 52

Rethinking Cold War Connections

The Second World War and its aftermath changed many of these aspects of heterogeneity and peripherality in Eastern Europe. Horrendous ethnic cleansing during and immediately after the war left it more homogeneous than before. However, no country was entirely homogeneous; Romania and Bulgaria retained sizable Hungarian and Muslim minorities, respectively, while Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were multi-ethnic constructions. Moreover, Eastern Europe ceased to be a contested periphery of Western Europe as the United Nations discontinued the minority treaties of the League of Nations and a Soviet hegemon arose. However, Yugoslavia in 1948 and Albania by 1960–61 de facto left the Soviet umbrella; Romania behaved quite autonomously from the early 1960s; and Greece and Turkey joined NATO in 1952.

Middle Eastern heterogeneity and peripherality changed, too, after the Second World War. Turkey's 1923 Lausanne Treaty minority clauses ended; and the 1948/9 Israeli-Arab War and the nakba established Jewish rule in much of ex-Mandate Palestine. Contested sovereignty ended with the termination of A Mandates in the late 1940s; moreover, the British military finalised its exit from the Suez Canal zone in June 1956. The Middle East became a competitive inter-state system without a clear regional hegemon, marginally pulling in even NATO Turkey with the 1955 Turkish-Iraqi-Iranian-Pakistani(-British) Baghdad Pact opposed by Nasserist Egypt and others.

As wartime and postwar Eastern Europe and the Middle East developed differently, it becomes somewhat more tenuous to treat the region as a unit of analysis sharing historically grounded commonalities. Still, there were important continuities: elements of structural similarity remained as well as common cultural and religious groups. They both fostered enduring contacts and connections beyond new borders and geo-political divides. One example concerns religious communities. Eastern European Muslims, like Africans and Asians, continued to pursue religious studies in Middle Eastern centres of learning like al-Azhar, in Cairo. Most important, Muslims from southeastern Europe maintained contact with Turkey. Some Orthodox linkages across the region probably remained, too; Romania may be a particularly interesting case here, since it was in principle Orthodox as well as fairly autonomous from the USSR.Footnote 53 Another example concerns Jews and Israel. A relatively large continuous Jewish presence in the Soviet Union and Hungary, and even small Jewish communities elsewhere, shaped Eastern European and Soviet relations with Israel in fields as varied as Jewish emigration, Israeli intelligence collection and post-Cold War pilgrimages to sites in Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet countries.Footnote 54

During the Cold War political relations and solidarities tightened considerably, often between governments; they built on, and substantively expanded, interwar political relations, most importantly Soviet-led Comintern support of Middle Eastern communists.Footnote 55 One dynamic shaping these political relations was the Arab-Israeli conflict. The small but growing literature on relations between Arab states and communist Eastern European governments other than the Soviet Union has focused particularly on the West and East German governments, and their diverging choice of allies in the Middle East.Footnote 56 These choices reflected the legacies of the Holocaust as well as the Cold War logic of the West German Hallstein Doctrine, which threatened to cut all ties with any state recognising East Germany. From its birth in 1949, East Germany struggled to gain recognition from non-socialist as well as socialist states. It succeeded first in the Arab world, as a result of reactions to the special relationship with Israel fostered by the West German government in recognition of German responsibility for the Holocaust. Egypt retaliated against West German reparations, which it perceived as strengthening Israel militarily, by becoming the first non-communist, non-European country to sign a long-term commercial deal with East Germany and start discussions about opening consulates. Trade agreements with East Germany were signed by Lebanon in 1953 and Syria in 1955. In 1956, Egyptian President Nasser's famous Suez Canal nationalisation speech castigated the West German government's compensation as an example of Western imperialist support of Israel; this was followed by the Anglo-Franco-Israeli attack on Egypt. The East German government issued an official reaction, widely distributed in the Arab World, which underlined West Germany's support for Israel and asked for an immediate stop to reparations.Footnote 57 In 1969 first Iraq, then Sudan, and finally South Yemen, Syria, and Egypt, devastated by the Six-Day War, opened full diplomatic relations with East Germany and broke (in Egypt's case until 1972) with the Federal Republic, which remained at Israel's side.Footnote 58 These themes are picked up in Massimiliano Trentin's article in this special issue, which studies East German advisers in 1960s Syria.

Soviet relations with Middle Eastern states after the Second World War also had prewar roots, shaped by geo-strategic considerations resulting from geographic proximity. As we have seen, Alp Yenen argues that the USSR signed treaties with the Northern Tier states of Iran, Afghanistan and nascent Turkey in the early 1920s to keep Western European empires away from its southern borders. In the Cold War, the Middle East's proximity to Soviet territory and Soviet-Turkish, -Iranian, and -Afghan borders meant that the region remained a geo-strategic concern for the USSR, while British and US governments took a lively interest in the Middle East, trying to contain a feared Soviet push southwards. The 1947 Zhdanov Doctrine in principle excluded the Middle East from the Soviet- and US-led world camps, at a moment when the Soviet leadership ascribed no value to alliances with progressive nationalist Third World movements, as would be the case under Khrushchev. One notable consequence of this was the success of the 1953 CIA-led coup in Iran, after a lack of Soviet support for Mohammad Mosaddeq in turn eroded Iranian communists’ support for the 1951–3 Iranian Prime Minister.Footnote 59 But since the Middle East bordered the USSR, the Soviet government could not afford to ignore developments there, even before Stalin's death. Thus, the Soviet embassy in Tehran reported ceaselessly about Mosaddeq's government. Already in 1944, moreover, the Soviet government started to bring Middle Eastern visitors to the USSR again. Especially in Muslim-majority republics, officials showcased Soviet modernity, including broad electrification, often through dams, mechanised agriculture, industrialisation, and – unlike the United States – universal education and health care. They insisted Islam was not repressed and that they were honouring Turkic and Persianate legacies. Non-Middle Easterners came for visits, too – but later.Footnote 60 Moreover, in 1945 the Soviets pressured the Turkish government to allow the USSR a say in the defence of the Straits; Anglo-American resistance nixed the move. In 1948 the Soviet representatives at the United Nations supported Israel's establishment, hoping to draw in the nascent Jewish state, which at that point was not clearly West-aligned. In the early 1950s the Soviet government was concerned about a planned Anglo-American-led Middle East Command involving Egypt (which rejected the idea), and about Turkey joining NATO. Contacts with Egypt from the late 1940s produced the famous Czech-Egyptian weapons deal in 1955.Footnote 61 And when the Soviet government under Khrushchev revised its policy toward the Third World, Middle Eastern states were among the earliest and remained among the most important clients or allies – a fact that, as Constantin Katsakioris's article on education exchanges argues, was also influenced by proximity.

By the same token, cultural and economic relationships and exchanges between Eastern Europe and the Middle East took on a new flavour, while having recognisable prewar roots. Interestingly, Soviet involvement in the Middle East worked not least through ecclesiastical channels – related to the fact that co-religionists lived in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Although atheist, the Soviet communists did not close the Armenian See at Echmiadzin, but rather used its influence in the Middle East (and elsewhere, including the United States).Footnote 62 And after Stalin had the Orthodox Church reorganised in 1943, the Moscow Patriarchate was given the task of resuming contacts with Christians abroad, in order to foster diplomatic relations with countries such as Bulgaria, Palestine, Egypt and Syria. Stalin initiated this policy as a means of maintaining the geopolitical advantages conferred by Russia's historic role as protector of Orthodox Christians, and it was continued by his successors.Footnote 63

A shared experience of relative economic backwardness vis-à-vis Western Europe formed the backdrop, in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, for what has been called socialist globalisation.Footnote 64 Although Eastern European countries rapidly industrialised after the Second World War, they never succeeded in overcoming this economic lag. This relative underdevelopment was partly reinforced by the economic Cold War, launched by the government of the United States and backed by its Western allies.Footnote 65 Although Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) countries did not see themselves as underdeveloped, they did lag behind Western Europe and became increasingly technologically and financially dependent on their Western European counterparts.Footnote 66 On the other side, this common experience created a sense of proximity between Eastern Europe and newly independent countries, including in the Middle East. Moreover, early COMECON development projects were directed toward Middle Eastern countries.

While the first three articles in our special issue focus on the entangled relations between Eastern Europe and the Middle East before the Second World War, the remaining five contributions tackle the multilayered logic of these cultural and economic relationships in the Cold War. Each highlights how the longer transnational and international histories discussed in this introduction shaped those relationships. In her article on Yugoslavia's negotiations with the Middle East over energy and economic cooperation through projects such as the Adria oil pipeline, Ljubica Spaskovska shows how competing senses of triumphalism and vulnerability marked the shift from decolonisation to globalisation in the realm of the international political economy. Smaller non-oil producing countries such as Yugoslavia and the rich Middle East saw interdependence as both an opportunity and a threat. More broadly, Yugoslavia's ability to develop a tight relationship with Nasser's Egypt and to become a core member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and similar moves by Romania, were based on common readings of their past and present underdevelopment and need for development aid.Footnote 67

Eastern European socialist states advertised their own model of development in the Middle East as a socialist path to modernity, again suggesting that the international history of Cold War relations in the region was shaped at least in part by shared societal experiences of peripherality. Thus, Massimiliano Trentin's article focuses on a special group of East German advisors working in Syria from 1965 to 1972, helping the Ba'athist leadership to reform those state institutions that would oversee development programs and their instruments. Central planning, land reform and the management of state companies were among the key issues upon which the two countries built a long-lasting partnership.

Such exchanges were not confined to economic development, as Constantin Katsakioris demonstrates by revisiting the Eastern bloc's educational assistance to North Africa and the Middle East, looking at both the creation of schools and the training of students. He analyses the political and economic premises behind this cooperation and investigates the role of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. His article highlights the centrality of education in the political economy of the Eastern bloc's relations with this region.

In the late Cold War, as Łukasz Stanek shows, cooperation across the region was influenced by the liminal and unequal integration of Eastern Europe into the nascent economic globalisation. Pretending that they were helping their Middle Eastern neighbours, communist elites tried to get access to raw products without having to use convertible currency.Footnote 68 By focusing on an industrial facility in Baghdad, Stanek shows how East German and Romanian companies strove to bypass obstacles stemming from differing monetary regimes, corporate structures and technical standards. At the same time, these companies exploited opportunities stemming from petro-barter agreements, or the exchange of crude oil for goods and services.

Last but not least, Eastern Europeans and Soviets sometimes developed a nostalgic and exoticising view of the Third World as a locus of continued revolution at a time when that sentiment was growing stale at home. Philipp Casula explores the relations between the USSR and Middle Eastern revolutionary movements. Using South Yemen and Dhofar as a case study, he highlights how a specific Soviet Orientalism shaped these relations. Soviet academics, journalists and politicians approached and treated revolution in the Middle East with both a cultural and a political sense of superiority. Despite the symbiosis which developed, the Soviet side failed to appreciate the political potential of socialist currents in the region.Footnote 69

The eight articles in this special issue bring various historiographical discussions into conversation. This introduction has identified four important points that cut across and underlie these articles. Let us conclude by recapping them. Firstly, geography matters. Eastern Europe and the Middle East are neighbours. This proximity has facilitated interactions, though in changing ways, as we have shown. Secondly, this special issue reminds us time and again of the enduring, complex legacies of Eastern European and Middle Eastern overlapping – in the Ottoman case – and neighbouring, interacting empires, and their multilayered interplays and overlaps with nation-states and transnational actors. Thirdly, Eastern Europe and the Middle East shared a key trait. Their populations were ethnically, linguistically and religiously heterogeneous – key religious communities in fact straddled the region, partly facilitated by neighbouring imperial projects – and from the nineteenth century they both led and endured national homogenisation. And fourthly, despite obvious differences between Eastern Europe and the Middle East, from the nineteenth century at least until the Second World War one can see them as Western Europe's joint periphery, which Western Europeans deemed less civilised, backward and politically immature. These factors mattered greatly before the Second World War – and even thereafter. Postwar circulations and alliances between Eastern Europe and the Middle East cannot be reduced to Cold War diplomatic games. Rather, they were shaped by a long common history, too.

Acknowledgements

This project started with two workshops on Eastern European/Russian-Middle Eastern relations respectively in Princeton and Geneva, financed thanks to the generous support of the co-funded programme of both universities as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation.

References

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11 Marlene Kurz et al., eds., Das Osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2005); Norbert Spannenberger and Szabolcs Varga, eds., Ein Raum im Wandel. Die osmanisch-habsburgische Grenzregion vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014); Arno Strohmeyer and Norbert Spannenberger, eds., Frieden und Konfliktmanagement in interkulturellen Räumen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013).

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14 Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular, ‘Alternative Muslim Modernities: Bosnian Intellectuals in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59, 4 (2017), 912–43.

15 Lale Can, ‘The Protection Question: Central Asians and Extraterritoriality in the Late Ottoman Empire’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 48 (2016), 679–99. For the early twentieth century, see Adeeb Khalid, ‘Central Asia between the Ottoman and the Soviet Worlds’, Kritika, 12, 2 (2011), 451–76. On Islam in Russia in general, see Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and a more recent interpretation, Mustafa Tuna, Imperial Russia's Muslims: Islam, Empire and European Modernity, 1788–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

16 James H. Meyer, Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

17 Vladimir Hamed-Troyanski, ‘Imperial Refuge: Resettlement of Muslims from Russia in the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1914’ (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2018).

18 Denis Vovchenko, Containing Balkan Nationalism: Imperial Russia and Ottoman Christians, 1856–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). More broadly: Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky, eds., Russian-Ottoman Borderlands. The Eastern Question Reconsidered (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). See also Taki, Tsar and Sultan; Lieven, The Russian Empire.

19 Note that the current meaning of ‘minority’, a group whose most often ethnic or religious particularity has political consequences for ‘its’ nation-state, crystallised following the First World War. Benjamin White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 21–3.

20 Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile. The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995).

21 Ussama Makdisi, The Age of Coexistence. The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).

22 Antonio Ferrara and Niccolò Pianciola, ‘The Dark Side of Connectedness: Forced Migrations and Mass Violence between the Late Tsarist and Ottoman Empires (1853–1920)’, Historical Research, 92, 257 (2019), 608–31; M. Hakan Yavuz and Hakan Erdagoz, ‘The Tragedy of the Ottomans: Muslims in the Balkans and Armenians in Anatolia’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 39, 3 (2019), 273–81; Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘Macedonians in Anatolia: The Importance of the Macedonian Roots of the Unionists for their Policies in Anatolia after 1914’, Middle Eastern Studies 50, 6 (2014), 960–75. Thus, Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba. A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) diagnoses two foundational traumas shaping two interconnected nations.

23 Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman, ‘Introduction: Aftershocks: Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War’, Contemporary European History, 19, 3 (2010), 183–94; Robert Gerwarth and Uğur Ümit Üngör, ‘The Collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires and the Brutalization of the Successor States’, Journal of Modern European History, 13, 2 (2015), 226–48; Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Mark von Hagen and Karen Barkley, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). Focused on Eastern Europe: Tim Buchen and Frank Grelka, eds., Akteure der Neuordnung. Ostmitteleuropa und das Erbe der Imperien, 1917–1924 (Berlin: Epubli, 2016).

24 The Western European professor in the commission failed to notice that the First World War on the western front was not less savage than the Balkan war: Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–6.

25 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

26 Gradvohl and Marès, ‘Enjeux’, 17; Mazower, Balkans, 58.

27 France was a republic in 1792–1804 and 1848–51 and from 1870; Sweden/Finland was a monarchy, too.

28 Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Stefan Rohdewald and Dirk Uffelmann, ‘Einleitung: Polnisch-osmanische Verflechtungen in Kommunikation, materieller Kultur, Literatur und Wissenschaft’, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 65, 2 (2016), 161n10.

29 Habsburg Empire: Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1981).

30 John Deak, ‘Habsburg Studies within Central European History: The State of the Field’, Central European History 51 (2018), 54. A case: Dominique Kirchner Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

31 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Miroslav Hroch, Das Europa der Nationen: die moderne Nationsbildung im europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

32 Feroz Ahmad, ‘Ottoman Perceptions of the Capitulations 1800–1914’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 11, 1 (2000), 1–20; Turan Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Umut Özsu, ‘The Ottoman Empire and the Abode of Islam’, in Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

33 Miller and Berger, Nationalizing Empires; Ulrike von Hirschausen and Jörn Leonhard, eds., Empires und Nationalstaaten: im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009). See also Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard, eds., Comparing Empires. Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). For inter-imperial mimesis more generally, see Jeremy Adelman, ‘Mimesis and Rivalry: European Empires and Global Regimes’, Journal of Global History, 10 (2015), 77–98.

34 Khoury and Kennedy, ‘Comparing Empires’; Gammerl, ‘Vergleich von Reich zu Reich’. More generally: Virginia H. Aksan, ‘Locating the Ottomans among Early Modern Empires’, Journal of Early Modern History, 3 (1999), 103–34; Mikhail and Philliou, ‘Imperial Turn’.

35 Copeaux, ‘Mer’; also Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, ‘Von duchi´nszczyzna bis zur Sonnensprachtheorie. Über die Verflechtungen zwischen polnischem Anti-Russismus und türkischem Nationalismus’, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 65, 2 (2016), 215–40.

36 See also Magdalena Wrobel Bloom, Social Networks and the Jewish Migration between Poland and Palestine, 1924–1928 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2016).

37 Hugh Poulton, ‘The Muslim Experience in the Balkan States, 1919–1991’, Nationalities Papers, 28, 1 (2000), 45–66. Migration: Kemal Kirişci, ‘Post Second World War Immigration from the Balkan Countries to Turkey (Excerpts)’, Turkish Review of Balkan Studies 2 (1994), 175–80; Hikmet Öksüz and Ülkü Köksal, ‘Emigration from Yugoslavia to Turkey (1923–1960)’, Turkish Review of Balkan Studies 9 (2004), 145–77; Ayşe Parla, ‘“For Us, Migration is Ordinary”: Post-1989 Labour Migration from Bulgaria to Turkey’, in Hans Vermeulen, Martin Baldwin-Edwards and Riki van Boeschoten, eds., Migration in the Southern Balkans: From Ottoman Territory to Globalized Nation States (Cham: Springer International, 2015).

38 Nathalie Clayer, Fabio Giomi and Emmanuel Szurek, ‘Introduction’, in Nathalie Clayer, Fabio Giomi and Emmanuel Szurek, eds., Kemalism: Transnational Politics in the Post-Ottoman World (London: Tauris, 2019), 5. See also Dženghis Hakov, ‘Les relations bulgaro-turques à la lumière de l'influence kémaliste parmi les Turcs bulgares pendant les années vingt et trente’, Études Balkaniques, 33, 3–4 (1997), 25–32; Anđelko Vlašić, ‘Modern Women in a Modern State: Public Discourse in Interwar Yugoslavia on the Status of Women in Turkey’, Aspasia, 12 (2018), 68–90.

39 General: Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, ‘Mental Maps. Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 28, 3 (2002), 493–514; Huseyin Yilmaz, ‘The Eastern Question and the Ottoman Empire: The Genesis of the Near and Middle East in the Nineteenth Century’, in Michael Bonine, Abbas Amanat and Michael Ezekiel Gasper, eds., Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 11–35.

40 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

41 For Eastern Europe see Tomasz Zarycki, Ideologie of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2014).

42 Certainly western Russia – though more rarely Russia to the east of the Urals – was both in Western European eyes and often in its own people's eyes a bridge between Europe and Asia, too. Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov and Marlene Laruelle, eds., Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). See, relatedly, particularities of Russian Orientalism: Vera Tolz, Russia's Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also, see this fascinating exchange: Adeeb Khalid, ‘Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism’, Nathaniel Knight, ‘On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid’, and Maria Todorova, ‘Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate’, all in Kritika, 1, 4 (2000), 691–700, 701–15, and 717–27. See also Masha Kirasirova, ‘The “East” as a Category of Bolshevik Ideology and Comintern Administration: The Arab Section of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East’, Kritika, 18, 1 (2017), 7–34.

43 Quote: Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, vii, 16; Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, 54, 4 (1995), 917–31.

44 First as: Henri Pirenne, ‘Mahomet et Charlemagne’, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 1, 1 (1922), 77–86.

45 Greene, World; Christophe Picard, La mer des califes. Une histoire de la Méditerranée musulmane (VIIe–XIIe siècle) (Paris: Seuil, 2015).

46 Michele Alacevich, ‘Planning Peace: The European Roots of the Post-War Global Development Challenge’, Past & Present, 239, 1 (2018), 219–64 and Véronique Plata-Stenger, Social Reform, Modernization and Technical Diplomacy. The ILO Contribution to Development (1930–1946) (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020).

47 Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, ‘The International Development of Economically Backward Areas’, International Affairs, 20, 2 (1944), 157–65, here 159. Also see his interview for the Oral World Bank History Project https://oralhistory.worldbank.org/transcripts/transcript-oral-history-interview-paul-rosenstein-rodan-held-august-14-1961 (accessed 11 Dec. 2020.)

48 Some talk of a laboratory: Ntina Tzouvala, ‘“These Ancient Arenas of Racial Struggles”: International Law and the Balkans, 1878–1949’, European Journal of International Law, 29, 4 (2018), 1149; Umut Özsu and Thomas Skouteris, ‘International Legal Histories of the Ottoman Empire’, Journal of the History of International Law, 18, 1 (2016), 1. Sovereignty: Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner, ‘Introduction’, in Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner, eds., Sovereignty in Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–25; Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

49 Jacob Hurewitz, The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), vol. 2, 180.

50 Umut Özsu, Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 26; Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism, 109–13.

51 Edda Binder-Iijima and Ekkehard Kraft, ‘The Making of States’, in Wim van Meurs and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, eds., Ottomans into Europeans: State and Institution-building in South Eastern Europe (London: Hurst, 2010), 6.

52 Also Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

53 For prewar Greece, including Orthodox ecclesiastical issues, see Sotirios Roussos, ‘Greece and the Arab Middle East’ (PhD dissertation, SOAS, 1994).

54 Matitiahu Mayzel, ‘Israeli Intelligence and the Leakage of Khrushchev's “Secret Speech”’, Journal of Israeli History, 32, 2 (2013), 257–83, exemplifying a historic case of a Jewish-Mossad tie (while questioning its full significance); Csaba Békés and Dániel Vékony, ‘Unfulfilled Promised Lands: Missed Potentials in Relations between Hungary and the Countries of the Middle East, 1955–75’, in Philip E. Muehlenbeck and Natalia Telepneva, eds., Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 280; Mateja Režek, ‘Jugoslavija in nastanek Izraela: delitev Palestine in ilegalno preseljevanje Judov, 1945–1948’ [Yugoslavia and the Establishment of Israel: Partition of Palestine and Jewish Migration, 1945–1948], Acta Histriae, 21, 3 (2013), 361–76; Jeremy Sharon, ‘Breslov Seeking 6,000 Pilgrims for Uman’, The Jerusalem Post, 07 Sept. 2020. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/breslov-seeking-6000-pilgrims-for-uman-641307 (accessed 11 Dec. 2020.) See also Mateja Režek, ‘Jugoslovansko-izraelsko tajno sodelovanje v senci prve arabsko-izraelske vojne in spora z Informbirojem, 1948−1953’ [Yugoslav-Israeli Secret Cooperation in the Shadow of the First Arab-Israeli War and the Cominform Conflict, 1948–1953], Acta Histriae, 21, 4 (2013), 825−38, on intelligence cooperation; and Aleksandar Životić, Jugoslavija i Suecka kriza: 1956–1957 (Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 2008), who shows how Yugoslav Muslims resident in Egypt since before the Second World War played a role in linking the Yugoslav and Egyptian governments by the mid-1950s.

55 Tareq Ismael, The Communist Movement in the Arab World (London: Routledge, 2005). Eastern European governments had not been very deeply involved with Palestine or, for that matter, with Arab countries. See e.g. Krisztián Komár, ‘Hungarian-Egyptian Interwar Relations’, Mediterrán Tanulmányok, 12 (2003), 75–83; C. Botoran, ‘Sur l'histoire des relations roumano-égyptiennes entre les deux guerres mondiales (1919–1939)’, Romano-Arabica, 1 (1974), 21−35.

56 Orna Almog, ‘Unlikely Relations: Israel, Romania and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Accord’, Middle Eastern Studies, 52, 6 (2016), 881–96; V. Urum, ‘Sur les relations de la Roumanie avec les pays arabes de l'Afrique du Nord’, Romano-Arabica, 1 (1974), 37–48; Sielke Beata Kelner, ‘Ceausescu e la questione arabo-israeliana: una riflessione sulla politica estera romena’, in Gianvito Galasso, Federico Imperato Rosario Milano and Luciano Monzali, eds., Europa e Medio Oriente (1973–1993) (Bari: Cacucci, 2017), 339–62; Larry Watts, ‘The Third World as Strategic Option: Romanian Relations with Developing States’, in Muehlenbeck and Telepneva, Warsaw Pact, 101, 111; Kai Hafez, ‘Von der nationalen Frage zur Systempolitik: Perioden der DDR-Nahostpolitik, 1949–1989’, Orient, 36, 1 (1995), 77–95; Amélie Regnauld, ‘La RDA en Egypte, 1969–1989’ (PhD dissertation, Sorbonne, 2015); Steffen Wippel, Die Aussenwirtschaftsbeziehungen der DDR zum Nahen Osten: Einfluss und Abhaengigkeit der DDR und das Verhaeltnis von Aussenwirtschaft zu Aussenpolitik (Berlin: Das Arab. Buch, 1996); Martin Robbe, ‘Die DDR in Nah- und Mittelost’, Asien, Afrika, Lateinamerika, 21, 5 (1994), 551–601; Lutz Maeke, DDR und PLO. Die Palästinapolitik des SED-Staates (München: De Gruyter, 2017); Wolfgang Schwanitz, ed., Berlin-Kairo: damals und heute. Zur Geschichte deutsch-ägyptischer Beziehungen (Berlin: Deutsch-Ägyptische Gesellschaft, 1991); Harald Möller, DDR und Dritte Welt: die Beziehungen der DDR mit Entwicklungsländern - ein neues theoretisches Konzept, dargestellt anhand der Beispiele China und Äthiopien sowie Irak/Iran (Berlin: Köster, 2004); Wolfgang Schwanitz, ‘Wasser, Uran und Paktfreiheit? Zur Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen der DDR und Sudan (1955–1970)’, in Wolfgang Schwanitz, ed., Jenseits der Legenden: Araber, Juden, Deutsche (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1994); Vojislav Pavlović, ‘The Israel-Arab War of 1967: The Watershed in Tito's Foreign Policy’, in Galasso, Milano and Monzali, Europa e Medio Oriente, 363–76; Eduard Gombár, ‘Libya and Czechoslovakia 1960–1992’, Africa, 63, 2 (2008), 359–64; Yosef Govrin, ‘From Deep Freeze to Thaw: Relations between Israel and Czechoslovakia 1967–1990’, Jerusalem Review, 1, 1 (2006), 119−39; Rami Ginat, ‘Origins of the Czech-Egyptian Arms Deal’, in David Tal, ed., The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 145–67; Zoltán Prantner, ‘Interest or Value: Hungary and the Middle East between 1955 and 1965’, in László Nagy et al., eds., La crise des empires: Suez-Budapest 1956 (Szeged: Université de Szeged, 2007), 101–9; Békés and Vékony, ‘Unfulfilled Promised Lands’.

57 Lorena De Vita, ‘Ulbricht, Nasser and Khrushchev’, in Muehlenbeck and Telepneva, Warsaw Pact, 29, 40. Also Wippel, Außenwirtschaftsbeziehungen.

58 Regnauld, ‘La RDA en Egypte‘, 22.

59 Artemy M. Kalinovsky, ‘The Soviet Union and Mosaddeq’, Iranian Studies, 47, 3 (2014), 401–18; Vladislav Zubok, ‘Stalin, Soviet Intelligence, and the Struggle for Iran, 1945–53’, Diplomatic History, 44, 1 (2020), 22−46.

60 Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); James Pickett, ‘Soviet Civilization Through a Persian Lens: Iranian Intellectuals, Cultural Diplomacy and Socialist Modernity 1941−1955’, Iranian Studies, 48, 5 (2015), 805–26.

61 Ginat, ‘Origins’.

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68 Regnauld, ‘La RDA en Egypte’, 224–5.

69 See also Mark, James and Apor, Péter, ‘Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary 1956–1989’, Journal of Modern History, 87, 4 (2015), 852–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, somewhat related, the fascinating Marung, Steffi, ‘The Provocation of Empirical Evidence: Soviet African Studies between Enthusiasm and Discomfort’, African Identities, 16, 2 (2018), 176–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Notably, and ‘as Tomasz Zarycki, Vera Tolz, Wolfgang Kissel, Kerstin Jobst, Robert Born and others have argued, the eastern European intelligentsia also created their own Orientalist visions of “Eastness,” often in order to underline supremacies within the region, or, as in the case of Poland, to mark its mission civilisatrice in the East’: Mariusz Kalczewiak, ‘The Eastern Gaze. Eastern European Conceptualizations of the Non-European World’, CfP (31 May 2019) (https://networks.h-net.org/node/15531/discussions/4168256/cfp-eastern-gaze-eastern-european-conceptualizations-non-european). This patterns dates back at least to the 1800s and includes both travel writing and reports by emigres.